Home prices in California rise in December
Los Angeles Times
By Alejandro Lazo
... California home prices ticked up 1.1% in December from the previous month, continuing a slow but steady improvement for the state's housing market, according to data released Thursday. Home sales have been driven by low interest rates and a government tax break scheduled to expire April 30 for first-time buyers and certain current homeowners. In Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, steeply discounted foreclosure properties remain a big part of the market, though the percentage of those homes has been decreasing in recent months...
... Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, was optimistic about the state's housing recovery, particularly in coastal areas.
"We really are different from Florida and Arizona. We probably built houses in the wrong place, we probably built houses that were too expensive, but we did not build too many houses the way that other places did," Green said. "So that puts us in a fundamentally better position."...